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After being discharged from the Army Air Corps following end of the War in 1945, my dad wanted to buy a new car, but none were available. All industrial manufacturing had been drafted into the “war effort”, and there were even shortages of basic appliances like washing machines and refrigerators well into the late 40s after my parents married in 1946, their first child was born in 1948, before they bought a home in 1950 and began to furnish it. Only then were household goods more readily available. As commercial production returned, engineers again took up the question of [[Planned_obsolescence|Planned obsolescence]] that had first appeared in the mid 1920s and 30s — what level of [[Fashion]] or shoddiness (necessitating replacement of goods) would consumers tolerate, which is to ask, to what height of wastefullness could [[The System]] aspire in its “growth” toward [[Capitalism#Love_of_Money|Love of Money]].

The original log cabin had vanished, but the barn with two log cribs prevailed, built from Post Oak trees felled by axe on the property. Lumber for framing the barn roof and attached sheds, from which the farmhouse was also built, was milled from the same Post Oak trees at a local sawmill. Nearly a century later up until the mid 70s, my grandparents were mostly raising a vegetable garden as usual, tending fruit trees (pears, peaches), keeping a dairy cow, raising beef cattle, hogs, and chickens, milking, cooking with fresh cream, making butter and cottage cheese, buying chicks from a hatchery to raise for fryers, butchering chickens and hogs, making sausage, and smoking sausage, ham, and bacon. The land was poor, deep sandy soil, but the Soil Conservation Society had taught my grandfather to peanut farm, by which he was able to make loan payments and not lose the land. They had little money but I never thought of them as poor. They wanted for nothing, recycled before there was such a word. Their passions were not enflamed nor their desires manipulated by [[Advertising]] rooted in the works of Sigmnond Freud as popularized in America and developed for [[Advertising]] by his nephew [[Propaganda#Eddie_Bernays|Eddy Bernays]]. A grand pile of scrap metal from worn out things was heaped before the workshop garage awaiting a project for which the scraps might be used. We knew not to rip to shreds Christmas wrapping paper on my grandmother‘s packages, because she saved the paper, folding it neatly for use another year. The attic was filled with jars and containers from store bought goods that might be put to good use. Because of boyhood experience of their life, I know that all the blather about economic “growth” raising people out of “poverty” is nothing but yet more [[Propaganda]] of the [[wikipedia:Big_lie|Big Lie]].